Transterrestrial Musings has an interesting thread on the decline of Reason Magazine (I still subscribe but don’t find time to read it often), the LP and their anti-war stances. Some select comments (read the whole thread) :

Rand Simberg responding to “Definitional Disagreement’

What do you call a libertarian in favor of foreign invasion of a country that was not involved in attacks on the country the libertarian lives in?

I’d call him or her a libertarian who would have let the Nazis and Soviets carve up Europe, since they had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.

What if that country happened to decouple its oil from the US dollar a couple years before said invasion, yet this libertarian buys the WMD or grave threat argument pushed by the administration?

I’d call that particular libertarian an irrational conspiracy-mongering nutcase.

Peter Saint-Andre points out: “Libertarians are ideologues (I know; I was once one of them). While it’s pleasant to drink deeply from theory, being under the influence of philosophy usually leads to practical fecklessness. The antidote: read lots of history. Modern freedom emerged not because of philosophy but because of the historical experience of certain peoples in northwestern Europe”

Elias Israel:

More than “splintered” the Libertarian Party, the response to 9/11 has utterly demolished it.

As an LP state chair of many years, and a candidate for national LP chairman when 9/11 took place, I witnessed the debacle first-hand.

The LP is a party with almost complete focus on a particular domestic agenda. So much so that all foreign problems are recast as domestic ones. To the LP, every question of public policy boils down to whether it’s acceptable to make citizens pay the costs in taxes. Unsurprisingly, the LP’s answer is virtually always ‘no’.

Many of us, myself included, realized after 9/11 that this is an inadequate frame for world events. I don’t enjoy paying taxes any more than anyone else, but one has to realize after a time that there are worse things to fear.

Unfortunately, the LP as a whole was and is run by people who came from a more rigid anti-war stance. They have a peculiar myopia that causes nearby miscreants to loom much larger in their vision than foreign monsters.

Most of the people with money and influence have left the party, or been bodily tossed out. A graph of donations to the LP tells the tale– the peak reached in 2001 just before the attacks stands like a mountain over the comparatively barren valley that followed.

I have not changed in my view that in the years ahead, the new primary dynamic in public policy will be between “libertarian” and “traditionalist” axes instead of “liberal” and “conservative.”

But the LP has failed to take on the mantle of one of those wings by siding with what the people want — a robust defense of Liberty in the face of a complex world– so now it falls to others to try to fashion it. Perhaps the GOP will split into those two camps if the Democrats weaken much, much further.

In the meantime, I am without a party, like many others.